Question about "shady" niche

I'd be interested to hear your opinion on this. So I've got a few gardening sites and I really want to start targeting some cannabis growing advice KWs on those sites, I don't think I have any moral objection to it and there's some good opportunities. I wonder though, am I at risk of having my site penalized for the terms it currently ranks for because Google will class it as a "shady" site.

Just wondered if you had any thoughts.

Google's politics don't strike me as anti-weed. Top results for "cannibis" etc have lots of growing advice and associated stuff, and comparatively few legal/moralistic stuff.

I've never heard of any issues with niches like that.
There's many sites that are all about heroin and other drugs that are well beyond some weed.
I'd second the probability that they very likely just don't care.

i think you'll have no issues

AH cheers guys...might give it a go then!

Nothing shady about sharing information. WebMD has info on all kinds of drugs and they rank just fine. Cannabis being a health remedy as well, and legal in some parts of the world, I wouldn't worry about it.

Certainly not a problem, maybe in Adwords, but not in organic ranking. I'd stay away from gardening porn, but that's probably not a really profitable niche anyway.

There's really nothing shady about cannabis the way it stands now, seriously.

Considering the legal developments in places like the United States and Canada, cannabis is actually one of the hottest growing niches in online publishing, at least, if you have a time horizon of two to five years.

The law is definitely changing when it comes to weed, marijuana or cannabis.

With that said, in relation to your specific situation, I would focus on creating sub-categories dealing with medical marijuana.

Medical marijuana is more "ethical" and "acceptable" than advocating recreational drug use.

You should be able to get away with optimizing a medical marijuana-related terms as far as Google is concerned.

The overall strategy you should pursue if you are serious about pursuing this niche, is to gain a foothold in that niche so that when the law finally changes regarding the recreational use of marijuana, you will be well-positioned as far as the search engines go.

I think the niche has a lot of potential. Well it depends on a lot of factors, but I don't see why it should be a problem for you. It's more like an opportunity.